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The study aims to investigate how stakeholders in the UK farm-to-retail lamb value chain fared in the wake of Britain’s formal exit from the European Union, along with the worldwide COVID-19 epidemic.

Eight interviews were conducted with members of three separate stakeholder groups within the UK lamb value chain (farmers, meat processors and retail buyers) to ascertain the benefits and challenges faced. Interviews were transcribed and thematically coded, revealing three key “themes”: economic consequences, supply chain impacts and policy changes.

Farmers were positively affected by an increase in the lamb sale price, but meat processors and retail buyers were more negatively affected by changes to the export process (increased paperwork, bureaucracy challenges and border control checks) and labour shortages. All three groups complained of a perceived lack of support from Government, and of a sense of uncertainty in relation to the new UK Agricultural Policy and future international trade deals.

The study relates to a limited time-envelope (November 2021–March 2022), and interview sample (2–3 members of each group). Follow-up research will be required to ascertain whether these findings prevail across the UK lamb value chain, and to help inform Government with a view to protecting vulnerable stakeholders in the sector and securing British lamb for consumers.

The research provides novel insights into the UK lamb value chain at a time of market uncertainty.

There appears to be a linear (although by no means perfect) relationship between the amount of time children spend with adults in sport settings and the harms experienced by so many young athletes. Children who are professional or national team athletes, and those in the pipeline towards professional and high performance sport, are likely to spend the greatest amounts of time with adults in those sport settings.

This chapter outlines how sport participation has become so work-like for so many children who demonstrate talent in a sport. This can reach a point where some young athletes under the age of 18, or even under the age of 16, spend more time with coaches and training for sport than they spend in school or with their parents. Critiques of the system of early talent identification/early specialisation/intensive training and competition for children are followed by a summary of the types of harms experienced by children in that system.

The specificity of sport and the autonomy of sport organisations protects those organisations from responsibility or blame for the harms experienced by children. This chapter concludes with a call to exempt children from the autonomy of sport organisations and to establish recognition of children as a protected class in sports.

In response to calls for police reform, agencies and researchers have turned their attention to alternative responses to mental health crisis calls. Jurisdictions across the United States are adopting co-responder teams that bring qualified mental or behavioral health professionals into emergency responses by the police. The current study aims to estimate the prevalence and use of these teams in the United States and to document their varieties and features.

We developed and administered a first-of-its-kind survey to a nationally representative sample of local and state law enforcement agencies. A total of 568 agencies completed the survey. The current analysis provides a descriptive account of the use and practices of co-responder programs and crisis intervention among the responding agencies.

We find there is wide variation in the staffing, operations, qualifications, characteristics and beliefs about the effectiveness of co-responder programs across the country. Additionally, there is a lack of consistent programmatic guidance for these programs that can inform their future development. Consequentially, agencies face personnel and funding challenges in implementing and maintaining these programs.

This study showcases findings from the first national survey of co-responder teams that investigates the prevalence, characteristics and operation of these teams. This information is the first step in evaluating the effectiveness of co-responder programs and, in turn, developing evidence-based guidelines and protocols for their implementation.

The aboutness (a subject matter of resource) of information has been strongly emphasized when organizing and searching for different types of media resources. For video games, mood is one of the critical subjective elements that supports users in finding games of interest. The current study examines a previously developed video game mood controlled vocabulary (CV) to empirically test its applicability and evaluate the individual terms’ separability and distinctiveness.

The research team collected user reviews from Steam, an online game database. Three different games were selected for triangulation to represent each of the 17 moods identified in the existing CV, resulting in the selection of 51 games. Collected reviews were tokenized and investigated from individual, terminological and categorical levels of text analyses.

Through the application of multiple analysis techniques (frequency, cluster and network), findings confirm the intuitiveness and usefulness of the existing CV. Additionally, opportunities for increased category separability and distinctness are identified for three moods: Aggressive, Quirky and Intense.

The current study adopts a user-centered perspective to evaluate the existing metadata framework created based on literature analysis. This study aims to complement the literature-based framework with users’ perspectives to enhance the metadata for interactive multimedia resources, such as video games.

Climate change (CC) poses significant risks to society, but there are ways people can address it – including in their personal and professional lives. One professional context – higher education – has a unique role in tackling CC through educating future leaders and researching potential solutions. This study aims to identify the predictors that determine climate action in the university.

The predictors of climate action (including both personal behaviour change and academic subject choice) are examined amongst both university students and staff at a UK university. The authors present the results of an online survey (N = 3,326).

Climate education and research were associated with early and mid-career researchers, years working/studying and academic field, with engineering staff/students most involved. Climate anxiety and awareness of university climate emergency declarations and credible climate information sources significantly explain academic behaviour among students and academics. In addition, activities with substantial carbon footprints, such as driving and eating ruminant meat, could be associated with CC research and teaching.

These results highlight the importance of improving climate literacy, and sustainability initiatives within higher education. To address the urgent issues of CC, higher education institutions must integrate climate education, research and sustainable practices.

The purpose of this study is to find out the place of non-managerial workers, including blue- and gray-collar workers, through analyzing how different schools of thought in the strategic management (SM) literature approach strategy making from the viewpoint of an organizational hierarchy, especially top-level management team, or human competence, no matter whether they occupy any hierarchical position. There is a gap in the literature regarding the extent to which non-managerial workers engage in SM processes. While their role has been acknowledged by many scholars, there is a need for further explanation of how different schools of thought in SM hold varying assumptions about organizational actors in non-hierarchical positions. In this regard, this study aims to question the dominant hierarchy logics of different strategy schools. This will be done through analyzing the strategy literature with a “strategy-making skills & capability centered” lens, and conceptualization of the hierarchical positions’ role in SM will be criticized. By this way, the role of gray- and blue-collar workers in SM literature would be better understood.

The implementation of value management (VM) principles in stealth construction projects is explored comprehensively in the chapter. It elucidated how VM positively influences various facets of construction, including environmental protection, health and safety, project delivery duration, economy, and aesthetics. Applying VM techniques, such as proactive risk management, resource optimisation, and stakeholder collaboration, is essential for achieving project objectives while ensuring sustainability, efficiency, and stakeholder satisfaction. Furthermore, the chapter emphasises VM’s benefits, challenges, and relevance across all stages of the construction lifecycle, from pre-construction planning to post-construction evaluation, underscoring its integral role in driving continuous improvement and innovation in the construction industry. Overall, the discourse emphasises the importance of VM in optimising outcomes and maximising value in stealth construction projects.

This study aims to examine the long-run relationship between macroeconomic and financial conditions and the aggregate number of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the USA, drawing on data spanning from 1928 to 2019.

The study estimated a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) encompassing four variables: the aggregate number of M&As, industrial production, the rates on three-month U.S. treasury bills and the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

There exists a long-run relationship among the four variables. An increase in industrial production is associated with a fall in M&A transactions, reflecting a tendency for M&A waves to start during economic downturns. Similarly, contractionary monetary policy, which often happens during good economic and financial times, leads to a decline in M&A activity. When the equilibrium among the four variables is disrupted, the aggregate number of M&As, along with financial conditions, works to restore the equilibrium.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the long-run relationship between macroeconomic and financial conditions using data spanning nearly a century.

This study examines the impact of climate legislation on green agricultural production and tests the heterogeneous impact of different types of climate legislation on agricultural green production.

In this study, the super-slacks-based measure (super-SBM) model is used to calculate agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP). The impact of climate legislation (including legislative acts and executive orders) on AGTFP is examined through regression analysis. The transmission mechanism of climate legislation affecting agricultural green production is further investigated.

This study shows that climate legislation has a positive long-term effect on AGTFP. It stimulates innovation in agricultural green technology but has a negative impact on resource allocation efficiency. Executive orders have a more significant effect on AGTFP than climate legislative acts. The effectiveness of climate legislation is more significant in countries with stronger legislation. Moreover, climate legislation reduces AGTFP in low-income countries while enhancing AGTFP in high-income countries. This effect is most prominent in upper-middle-income countries.

This study examines the different effects of various types of climate legislation, considering the level of economic development and the strength of the legal system on AGTFP. The findings can offer a global perspective and insights for China’s policymaking.

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel guided inquiry-based pedagogical practice embedded into regular library and information science (LIS) courses to improve LIS students’ information literacy (IL) in a developing country.

A guided inquiry-based pedagogical practice for IL instruction was introduced and embedded into two regular courses in an LIS school. The effectiveness of the new approach was evaluated in a longitudinal pre-test- and post-test-based teaching intervention with a control group.

All aspects of IL skills improved among the students participating in the teaching intervention showcasing the benefits of the inquiry-based pedagogical practice. In addition, the students in the intervention group learned the course subject content more in depth than students in the control group. However, no consistent learning benefits were achieved in IL knowledge, and only sporadic associations were found between IL knowledge and skills.

This study breaks new ground in IL teaching intervention in LIS schools. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to apply an inquiry-based approach, embed teaching into more than one regular course, collect pre-test and post-test data to evaluate learning outcomes in IL knowledge and skills and control learning outcomes in subject contents.